


Uncage the Leopard (Let Him See His Spots)

by TheVeryLastValkyrie



Series: The Institute of Life and Death [1]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2015-06-07
Packaged: 2018-04-03 07:13:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4091917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVeryLastValkyrie/pseuds/TheVeryLastValkyrie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who are the knights, and who are the knaves? There's a beautiful woman with a beautiful man tied to a chair, and two brilliants falling in love, and a noble savage being serenaded in Spanish. Milady runs an international criminal empire, and they're all her employees (whether they want to be or not). References to sadomasochism, torture, previous rape and self-harm, but still rather cheerful for all that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Uncage the Leopard (Let Him See His Spots)

Athos doesn’t know how long she’s been hitting him, or when he started to enjoy it. He knows that every time he cracks a puffy eyelid, he sees her: in her lacy white blouse and her tight black skirt, with most of her hair piled on top of her head. A few pieces have floated down, shaken out of place by her – to give her her due – killer backhand. He’s gone, between licking his parched lips and trying not to lose consciousness, from wondering whose neck he’s going to have to break to get out of here to what her tennis serve is like. His thoughts are disconnected, irrelevant to the situation he’s currently in; they float around the inside of his skull like soap bubbles.

They pop when she hits him.

“What,” he demands, teeth clenched tighter together at the soft hand she lays on his battered cheek than they were for her slaps. “ _Exactly_ do you do for him?”

Anneliese de Winter (not her real name) pauses. She draws back her hand, and his blood, so used to rushing to the surface of his skin to cause swelling and start the healing process, pools in the void she left. It’s almost like he’s blushing. “D’Artagnan,” she replies, sounding amazed that he has to ask. “Works for _me_ , not the other way around. He’s not a traitor – well, he is, but not the one you’re after.” Meditatively, she runs her tongue over her teeth. His feel loose. “We met, we had a couple of drinks, we had sex, and then I framed him for murder. Gave him twenty-four hours to prove his innocence.” And she smiles, actually smiles, like a proud parent on sports day. “He did it in twelve.”

“What did you promise him?”

“Everything,” de Winter says simply. “Money, a chance to see the world, and more girls than an Ikea super king can handle. That said –” Athos groans as she slips her hand back under his chin, turning his face to the side. She winces, and he can’t tell whether she’s admiring her handiwork or tacitly apologising for it. “He’s taken quite to a shine to Constance.”

“Constance?”

“Bonacieux. Analyst. Brilliant, of course. Your lot recruited her her first week out of Oxford, offered her thirty thousand a year and that her brother Benoit wouldn’t be prosecuted for possession of a frankly eccentric porn collection. I offered her thirty million, plus the promise he _would_ be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” She’s sitting on the edge of her desk at his point, and crosses her legs at the ankle. “He was thirty-four and still hadn’t left home. She made the right decision.”

Constance Bonacieux has certainly made the right decision (morality aside), but Athos’ head is spinning: d’Artagnan, with his easy smile, with his quick finger on the trigger, with his t-shirts under the suit jackets Athos made him have tailored…d’Artagnan, his protégé, isn’t even who he’s hunting? He considers vomiting, partly out of frustration and partly from a possible concussion, but suddenly ‘Milady’ is there, filling his field of vision. She is beautiful, undeniably so. She’s well-spoken, and she wears Penhaligon’s Night Scented Stock, and there’s a fingernail’s width gap between her front teeth that folk wisdom claims indicates lust. It isn’t lust which has her up close and personal, though, speaking swift, sharp words all but into his mouth with no trace of an accent.

“I only told d’Artagnan what I’ll tell you for free, The Honourable Oliver de la Fère, alias Athos,” she murmurs. Her gaze flicks down to his lips, back up again. She knows he’s dehydrated (and quite possibly perforated in several places), and she doesn’t appear to care. “You’re on a leash. They only give you as much slack as you need to kill, and no more. You think you’re free. You think you can leave any time, do any other job, live any other life. If that’s true –” And though it doesn’t seem doable, she moves even closer, and the tip of her nose bumps against his in a sendup of an Eskimo kiss. “Why break off your engagement?”

The question gives him clarity, if only briefly. He arches forward, not his neck but his chest, forcing her back an inch or so. Anger and bitterness, both hot and heavy, fill the newly expanded cavity. “Who the fuck are you? What the _fuck_ gives you the right –”

“You could’ve gone with her to Unpronounceable in Africa. Maybe you’d have liked it. Maybe you’d have built the school and the hospital and a couple of other things besides. Maybe people would live because of you, instead of die. Maybe…and maybe you’d get bored.” With a look in her clear green eyes almost of indecision, she slides her leg forward, puts her thigh between his. He feels something, that’s for damn sure. He feels _something_ , but he can’t answer her unspoken question as to what it is. “Maybe you’d start being irritated by the little things she did, by her persistent do-gooder nature. Maybe you’d stop having sex with her, and she’d ask you what was wrong, and you couldn’t say, because what was wrong would be her. Maybe you wouldn’t be able to get it up, and the best you could do to get yourself off on those desert nights would be to think about the filthiest section the filthiest website you went on when you last had internet access, three months before, and even that would only be just get you enough to get you to sleep. _Athos_.” Anneliese breathes his name, presses forward slightly with her knee. “People were meant to die because of you. There’s nothing wrong with it. In time, you’ll see that.”

He sees more than she could ever suppose he’d see. Right now, he sees the fleur-de-lis branded on her shoulder, visible through the filmy fabric of her shirt. He sees the tender skin behind her ear which means eczema, very minor, a prescription somewhere, a doctor, records. He sees the wetness over the bones of her chest where she sprayed on fresh perfume, and really, what kind of woman reapplies four hundred pound perfume to hit a man across the face?

“What are you going to do to me?” He enquires, in a tone of absolute disinterest. It fits him, in his bloody suit, with his bloody lip, with his bloody public school boy vowels and barely open eyes.

“Torture you a bit, obviously.”

“Oh, obviously.”

“No, no, I mean it.” She steps back, but that soft hand goes back to his jaw, and his broken bones shift like sand under her fingers. It hurts. It hurts _a lot_. “But just a bit. Just until you like it. I don’t usually have sex with men unless they like it when they’re tied to things, suffocating from the nice plastic bag over their head.”

“Funny,” says Athos drily. “I don’t usually have sex with women unless they’re the one tied to something.” Anneliese de Winter smiles again, actually smiles again, and laughs at him under her breath. It does something to her (it does something to _him_ , more to the point). “Is there any chance,” he continues, only mildly less ironic than miniature sausage rolls at a macrobiotic meat-free feast for the under-fives. “We could dispense with the ‘fuck me up, tie me down’ flirting anytime soon? It’s getting old rather fast.”

She only taps him this time, and very gently. They’re somewhere underground, perhaps a car park, only the innocuous desk and ergonomic swivel chairs mean either she has a very odd interior decorator, or he’s blacked out again. “We could,” she agrees. “Or I could take offence at your tone and jab a cattle prod into your testicles. I get the feeling I’d enjoy hearing you scream.”

“In that case, I have some alternate uses for plastic bags.”

“Good answer.”

**.**

Constance is doing a tea tray. She’s been told (repeatedly) that doing a tea tray is not what she’s paid exorbitant amounts of money to do, but the familiar ritual calms her, and anyone’s nerves would be frazzled working here. Milady keeps promising to do something about the soundproofing, but Porthos – curly hair, earring, truly gifted when it comes to making terrorists say things in Arabic they’d really rather not say in front of a Arabic-speaking torturer, teddy bear in a padded jacket – hasn’t gotten around to fitting up Room G yet. Constance normally wears headphones, but the unearthly sounds that come out of Queenie when she’s in one of her rages are enough to make anyone’s hands shake and the china chatter.

“Let me take that.”

“I didn’t hear you come in,” she says, more to the tea tray than to d’Artagnan.

He gleams. That’s what she calls it: he doesn’t grin, he gleams. He’s really good-looking, like, actually good-looking, not just photogenic or symmetrical or ripped enough that the exotic set of the bones in his face don’t matter. He has a leather jacket, and a pair of sunglasses stuffed in his top pocket, and he can fence, like, actually fence. She’s always had a yen to swish a sword about.

Milady arranged them to her satisfaction in Prague last time, in the same apartment block. God knows where she herself was, but she wasn’t the one answering the door when d’Artagnan knocked at quarter past four. He was jogging up and down on the spot, the dozens of plaited thread and leather bands he wears skidding up and down his knobbly wrists. Constance likes his knobbly wrists, and he has big hands too.

They drank blonde beer in a pub where nobody spoke any English, ate pretzels, sat in the same booth and knocked their knees into each other and made one another sizzle. It was late by the time they went out into the street; he radiated heat like a furnace, though, and the velvety summer sky was beautiful. They walked until they were lost, drunk and sloppy, twirling each other around and shouting in English, French, German and Italian from that summer she spent in Geneva. His big, hot hands framed her face, but he didn’t kiss her. He stared at her, and said that he liked the two different colours she dyed her hair, and the patches on her denim jacket, and the way her bum fit in her jeans (saucy). He didn’t kiss her, though, just went on staring while she got closer to catching fire like fat in a frying pan. He did put one big, hot hand over her heart where it bounced against the thin material of her strappy top (and surreptitiously cop a feel, because who wouldn’t, she can do simultaneous equations  _and_ put her legs behind her head). He didn’t say anything else after that, though.

Perhaps it’s best forgotten, that night in Prague.

“How can you hear anything at all over _that_?” D’Artagnan jerks his thumb over his shoulder at G.

“She can’t help it.”

She can’t, but Milady brought her in all the same.

Queenie isn’t her name, but it’s the safest thing to call her. She’s small, pale, frail, pretty, and she survived something nobody should have to survive. That would be enough to earn her sympathy, but she’s here because she found them, all eight of them, found their names and their addresses, held an antique service revolver to the eyeballs of the taxi drivers who wouldn’t give her a lift out of the goodness of their hearts, no charge – and then murdered them all. She’s having a timeout from reality as a consequence, but when she’s calmed down and stopped painting the walls with spaghetti hoops, they’ll make something of her. Aramis spends a least an hour everyday outside her door, strumming his guitar louder when she roars. Sometimes, she comes right up to the safety glass, presses her palm against it.

Sometimes, he presses back.

“Yeah, I know.” D’Artagnan passes a hand through his hair, which is getting too long. Constance itches to get her scissors on it, and her hands. He stands there, chewing his lip, holding the tea tray like the propmaster general while she loads him up with the pot and two old-fashioned cups on two saucers and a plate of biscuits, the tiny shining planets painted on her matte black fingernails glittering with every not so heavenly motion. “I know I can’t help, but –”

“But you can’t, so don’t waste time wishing you could.” Though the conscious part of her mind is taken up by the task at hand, by the boy in front of her, the unconscious part – that part that makes her brilliant – is causing her toes to tap, and before she realises it, she’s tapping out the current exchange rates in Morse code, and trying to predict whether they’ll go up or down via very specific Kegel exercises, which she can’t do correctly at the best of times. She shakes her head, and red-streaked brown hair flies out from behind her ears. “I hope you’re right about him. They’ve been in there for hours, but he won’t stop answering her back.”

The object of her desire ( _d’_ esire, she corrects herself internally, then steps on her own foot for being an idiot) shrugs. “That’s Athos.” And he does feel bad about betraying him. He’s cut up about it, but he can’t change the past, so there’s no point wishing he could. Athos is d’Artagnan’s brother, so belongs in this world, above him, at his side.

“She likes him.”

“Yeah.” Milady liked him too, at one point, and neither of them have forgotten it. It’s the only thing, to be honest, that’s holding them back. Constance likes d’Artagnan, and his wide mouth, and his sincerity, and his stupid sense of humour, and his habit of keeping mint imperials in the pockets of his jeans like an old man; d’Artagnan likes Constance, and the glasses Constance-ly sliding down and sometimes all the way off her nose, the glasses she downright refuses to get resized. He may even be in love with her glasses, actually, and her casual recitation of pi, and the memory of that time they went to the cinema in Cannes once, and she ate all her popcorn before the film had even started, and then all of his too. She leans against his shoulder when she’s tired these days, her gorgeously clever head with its gorgeously streaked hair heavy against him, and it makes him feel – well. It doesn’t turn him on, not exactly (except it does), but it kind of makes him want to protect her from everything, and let her write sums all over him in permanent marker.

Does she even remember that night in Prague?

Delicately, so as not to disturb his reverie, she places a final dark chocolate Leibniz just so on the annoyingly modern square plate. Milady has a thing about even numbers and food, especially when she has guests. Constance has a thing about plates being plates, and round, but she’s not the evil genius – she is one, but not _the_  one – who pays for the crockery around here.

“We should go to the cinema again,” she suggests, more to the tea tray than to d’Artagnan.

“I get Wednesday afternoons off.”

Because small, boutique criminal empires run on a similar timetable to French high schools, where these two still probably belong.

“Me too.”

“There you are, then.”

She snatches the tray from him, and he raises one eyebrow, and she purses her lips and flounces – as much as a mathematician in a pair of dungarees can flounce, and she’s that – towards the double locked doors with glowing blue the decontamination space between. It’s not a date. It’s _not_ a date.

D’Artagnan glows like the Sun, pumps his fist at her departing back (there they are, then).

**.**

_Aramis_ , she tries to whine (but it’ll come out as a yell, no words and no meaning, so why bother?) She’s been waiting for him to come, to bring her cool water with his voice, with the way he speaks to her, to put out the fire which makes her scritch and scratch, scritch-scratch, scritch-scratch. She even stopped pulling out her hair for him, bloody sodding bloody bloody sodding sodding man.

Queenie exists on two levels. On one, she is aware that she’s been violated psychologically as well as mentally, but that she is getting better, that her mind is taking the time to find its feet she denied it during her five week pan-European murder spree (who would’ve guesses she’d be so talented with a gun? And an axe? And a brick? And a blowtorch?) Rape her, will they? Take away the things she has, the things she’s owned since the day she was born? No, they will not. They’ll melt like snow when she burns them, and squeal like pigs when she cuts them, and they did melt, and they did squeal, and she’s dealing with it in her own sweet time.

She’s a murderer.

She’s good at being a murderer.

So on another level, she’s lost. She likes the colours her food makes when it smears across the white paint, and the noises her stomach makes frighten her, but she knows better than to feed it – or _knew_ better, before Aramis. He’s very insistent about certain things. She doesn’t get her water, her cooling music if she doesn’t eat her dinner, if she pulls out hanks of her golden hair. Even he knows better than to push it some days, but he still comes to her door, everyday, without fail. She wails at him to go away (with no words and no meaning), to leave her alone, that she’s nothing anymore, that she’s broken inside – and he still doesn’t leave.

“How’s my girl this morning?”

Silence is better than shrieking, so that’s how she greets him. Almost immediately, heedless of burns from the beige carpet opening the grazes on her knees, Queenie scurries across to the window in the lower portion of the door. There he is, in half-profile, the lovely line of his jaw all gold and ochre and bronze and Aramis-coloured. His image smears when she squints, and she likes the colours he makes then too (Aramis is as good as baked beans for artistic value. He’d look more than handsome spread all over a wall or a floor or a table, looking like he does).

“Song?” He asks, even more quietly. He’s kind to her, and neither the rational nor irrational part of her brain can work out why. “We’ve gone through most of Santana, since it sounds like you like Spanish guitar more than electric. I was wondering about something a bit more traditional, but if it’s going to too weird for you, having me sing you ballads, just say so. They kind of lose something without the words, you know?”

She loses nothing without the words, though. It’s one of the surprising things about her, one of the endearing things about the person with the large, Bambi-adjacent eyes which peer at him through the wire grid supporting the safety glass. Aramis considers Queenie extraordinary just the way she is, and not just because they’re both now in the business of dispatching people to Hell. Is she wearing an enormous pair of pink cotton pyjamas? Yes, yes she is. Does she have gouges down the length of both pink arms? Yes, yes she does. Has she all but cut herself ribbons trying to be herself again? Yes, yes she has. He admires all of that, and he desperately wants to be the one to change her dressings and to stroke her skin lovely again, but he can’t. It’s odd that he should want to, and he should discuss it with anyone other than Queenie herself.

“Lash chance, Your Highness?”

If she answers him, she may roar, or rub her face raw, pulling the skin tight and then slack over the bones, the better not to forget what she looks like. Better not to answer. Better to stare at him, and then, when he begins, to creep closer until all of her is pressed up against the glass, reaching him the best she can with what she has available to her at the moment. He’s not afraid of her, which is nice: which is very, very nice. He doesn’t flinch away from the regal purple stuff always crusted beneath her fingernails (Queenie genuinely is royalty, of a minor sort, but no one’s asked her about that yet. That’s why they took her, the eight who are all dead, whose blood she rubbed all over herself before she started to giggle).

She still feels like she’s on fire, but the music washes over her, and she hums. Aramis shuffles closer to the window, and she moves into him, banging her forehead rhythmically, ecstatically against the thick door.

Bloody sodding bloody bloody sodding sodding man.


End file.
